Unconscious bias

Proceedings B is committed to the efforts undertaken by the Royal Society and Royal Society Publishing to make users of our services aware of and responsive to the challenges posed by unconscious biases. As part of these efforts, the Royal Society has published an In Verba blog post,a guidance PDF, and short video animation to support users in understanding and tackling unconscious bias. Our authors are strongly encouraged to familiarise themselves with these publications when considering submitting to the journal.

Article types

Presubmission enquiries

Due to the very high volume of submissions received to Proceedings B, we are unable to consider presubmission enquiries to the journal. We ask authors to thoroughly read the journal's scope and the author information prior to submission to the journal.

Submission guidelines

Please take care to follow the Royal Society Publishing instructions for authors when preparing your article for submission. Our editorial policies can be found here. Please read these carefully before submission, paying particular attention to our ethics, open data and open access policies. It is free to publish articles that are 6 pages in length. Charges are levied for articles over 6 pages in length.

Proceedings B reserves the right to reject a paper if we cannot find referees.

The main text of your article should be divided into informative sections. Sufficient information should be included in the main text for the article to be self-contained; additional information and data should be included in the electronic supplementary material file. Please try to submit all additional information as a single supplementary file.

Continuous line numbering should be used on your submitted manuscript to make it easier for editors and reviewers to assess your work. Figures should be uploaded as separate files where possible.

All manuscripts are assessed for their appropriateness in the journal on submission and we do not consider pre-submission enquiries for research articles.

Authors will be informed once a final decision has been reached by the Editor. Appeals will only be considered if there has been a fundamental and clear misunderstanding of the research presented in the manuscript. Appeals are only allowed under exceptional circumstances at the discretion of the appropriate Editor and must be submitted within 6 weeks of the final decision being made. Appeals must be sent directly to the journal. Any appeals sent to the Editor-in-Chief will not be considered.

A tracked changes document of the text is required to be included as part of the ‘response to referees’ document for all resubmissions. This document should include only the changes made since the last submission.

Length restrictions, page and colour figures

Proceedings B levies charges for research articles which exceed 6 printed pages when published in the journal. As a rough guide, 850 words = 1 page and 2-4 small figures = 1 page. Please note that the title page, abstract, references and figure legends are all included in the word count.

We can consider articles that exceed this limit, up to 10 printed pages of the journal. We currently charge £200 per page or part page (plus VAT where applicable). For example, a 7 page article will attract a charge of £200, 8 pages £400, etc (plus VAT where applicable). Review articles do not incur page charges but are subject to the same length restrictions.

It is difficult to estimate how many printed pages in the journal an article will occupy before it is type-set. The number of journal pages an article occupies can be calculated using our Page Estimator Excel file.

Colour figures are welcomed in the journal. All figures will be published in colour online (the version of record), but will be reproduced in black and white in the print version of the journal by default. If you feel that print colour is essential for any of your figures, please list the relevant figure numbers on submission of your article. Please note that, because of the high cost of colour printing, the final decision on colour usage is made at the discretion of the Editor.

Open Access in Proceedings B

Authors may have their article made freely available to all, immediately upon publication, by payment of an article processing charge. Such articles are covered by a Creative Commons license allowing redistribution and re-use, and we deposit them in PubMedCentral on the author's behalf. Page charges and colour figure charges do not apply to Open Access articles. For full details including information on our Article Processing Charge please visit our Open Access page

Open data in Proceedings B

We require supporting data to be made available prior to publication so that all results are reproducible. For more information please refer to our data sharing policies. In order to make this policy as easy possible to comply with the Proceedings B submission system is fully integrated with the Dryad data repository. We also cover the cost of submitting data to Dryad up to 20GB.

Unless there are strong extenuating circumstances for doing so, we will not generally accept statements such as "Data and materials are available upon request from the authors" in our data accessibility statements. Exceptions are at the Editor's discretion.

Submit your article

Cover guidelines

Policy: Authors/Editors are invited to submit images for consideration for the cover of the journal. While authors are welcome to provide a mock-up of the cover, only original images are required. Please only submit single images for consideration; collages and composite images are unlikely to be selected. You will also need to confirm that you have full permission to reproduce the image online and in print in gratuity. An image does not need to have appeared in an article/issue but should be related to it. The final decision on the use of artwork is made by the journal Editors, and this decision is final. The journal Editors may crop, rotate or otherwise adjust images to fit the cover.

Image requirements: The artwork should consist of a single, square image of at least 2360 x 2360 pixels (1890 x 1890 px for Proceedings A and Philosophical Transactions A). Note that the Royal Society Publishing logo will be placed over the bottom left corner of the image.

Preprint repositories

In accordance with our preprint policy, we encourage authors to deposit early versions of articles in appropriate subject repositories or preprint servers.

Species descriptions

Articles describing new animal species must conform to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. All relevant information must be included in the main article. The online version is the relevant version for nomenclatural purposes. The article must be registered in ZooBank, the Official Registry of Zoological Nomenclature (http://zoobank.org), and contain evidence that such registration took place (e.g. exact date of registration or/and registration number). Articles describing new species must be flagged to the editorial office on submission.